neveragain.tech Pledge

13/12/2016

I just signed the neveragain.tech pledge. I think this is really important for people who work near the law enforcement community. It is possible that the data that we work with will be the first to be exploited by anyone working for a political end. Here is the text of the pledge for history's sake:

We commit to the following actions:

We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.

We will advocate within our organizations:

to minimize the collection and retention of data that would facilitate ethnic or religious targeting.

to scale back existing datasets with unnecessary racial, ethnic, and national origin data.

to responsibly destroy high-risk datasets and backups.

to implement security and privacy best practices, in particular, for end-to-end encryption to be the default wherever possible.

to demand appropriate legal process should the government request that we turn over user data collected by our organization, even in small amounts.

If we discover misuse of data that we consider illegal or unethical in our organizations:

We will work with our colleagues and leaders to correct it.

If we cannot stop these practices, we will exercise our rights and responsibilities to speak out publicly and engage in responsible whistleblowing without endangering users.

If we have the authority to do so, we will use all available legal defenses to stop these practices.

If we do not have such authority, and our organizations force us to engage in such misuse, we will resign from our positions rather than comply.

We will raise awareness and ask critical questions about the responsible and fair use of data and algorithms beyond our organization and our industry.